About the Campaign

Let Toys Be Toys is asking the toy and publishing industries to stop limiting children’s interests by promoting some toys and books as only suitable for girls, and others only for boys.

Toys are for fun, for learning, for stoking imagination and encouraging creativity. Children should feel free to play with the toys that most interest them.

Isn’t it time that shops stopped limiting children’s imagination by telling them what they ought to play with?

The answer is simple – we’re asking retailers, booksellers and manufacturers to sort and label toys and books by theme or function, rather than by gender, and let the children decide which toys they enjoy best.

About Let Toys Be Toys

We’re a parent-led campaign that grew out of a thread on parenting site Mumsnet which brought together parents frustrated by the increase in gender-based marketing and promotion to children.

In 2013 we launched our Toymark good practice award scheme, as a way of recognising and promoting book and toy retailers that are marketing their products inclusively to all children. We have now awarded over 50 toy and bookshops in the UK.

What we’ve achieved – books

Our Let Books Be Books petition asks publishers to stop labelling story and activity books as ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’. The launch of the petition for World Book Day 2014 gained widespread media coverage, and support from authors and media organisations. Usborne publishers announced they would no longer be publishing new titles labelled in this way, and nine other publishers have now followed suit. The Independent newspaper pledged not to review any titles which are explicitly labelled ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’.

Awards

In March 2016, we were honoured to win the BRIO prize from the Lennart Ivarsson Scholarship Foundation. In March 2015, we won Westbourne Comms Change Opinion award for Advocacy, and in May of that same year received the Care2 Impact prize. We were shortlisted for a National Diversity Award for Community Organisation in 2014, and in 2013, we won the Progressive Preschool Marketing Award.